If the financial mess down here on Earth is getting you down perhaps it’s time to look up. A group of astronomers were asked to vote for the Top 10 photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and, in order, here’s what they chose:

#10

The Trifid Nebula is 9000 light years away. It’s a ‘stellar nursery’ where new stars are born.

#9

The glowering eyes from 114 million light years away are swirling cores of two emerging galaxies called NGC 2207 and IC 2163.

#8
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Starry Night reminded astronomers of Van Gogh. It is a halo of light in the Milky Way.

#7

The Perfect Storm, a ‘small area’ in the Swan Nebula, is made of hydrogen, oxygen, sulphur and other elements.

 #6

The Cone Nebula. The part shown here is 2.5 million miles in length or equivalent to 23 million round trips to the Moon.

#5

The Hourglass Nebula is 8000 light years away. It has that pinched-in-the-middle look because winds that shape it are less turbulent in the center.

#4

Cat’s Eye Nebula.

#3

Nebula NGC 2392 is called Eskimo because it looks like a face surrounded by a furry hood. The hood is actually a ring of comet-shaped objects flying away from a dying star.

 #2

The Ant Nebula is within our galaxy and resembles an ant when observed using ground-based telescopes.

#1

The Sombrero Galaxy, 28 million light years away, was voted best in show. The dimensions of the galaxy are as spectacular as its appearance. It has 800 billion suns and is 50,000 light years across.

M. Ward chronicled his most recent 24 hours in New York with his iPhone. It reminded us of some things we love about our city.

Two of nature’s most spectacular forces produced an incredible brew in the skies of Chile as a volcanic eruption met a lightning storm. Tons of dust and ash from the eruption of the Chaiten volcano poured into the night sky just as an electric storm passed overhead. The resulting collision created a spectacular sight as lightning flickered around the dust cloud amid the orange glow of the volcano. The eruption was all the more spetacular because the Chaiten volcano, 800 miles south of Santiago, has been dormant for nine thousand years. The Patagonian volcano left a 12 mile high plume and left vast tracts of land coated with a layer of ash.


 

   

I don’t know about you but I’m always a reluctant fool when the Olympics come around. At first I think I’ll avoid them all together but eventually I break down and take a peek. I’ll see something exciting like a great dive or floor exercise or track event and eventually I’ve succumbed to the competition to the point where I’m watching every night and am truly sorry when the games end. Sure, there was way too much beach volleyball in primetime but overall, this was an amazing year. Perhaps the best ever. Hats off to NBC for spectacular camera work. As long as we kept the sound down when the annoying announcers were blathering, we found that we could enjoy the proceedings fully. Here’s a link to some great photographs taken from Beijing 2008.

–Sean Coakley

Last February, New York Times writer Charles McGrath pointed to the success of public radio in contrast to the ever-shrinking government support for public television in a piece titled Is PBS Still Necessary? in which he reported public radio now boasts some 30 million listeners, up from two million in 1980. Or, 28 million listeners in 28 years.

Even despite the current recession, many of the stations I talk to each week reported record or near-record fund drives this Spring. Non-comm Triple A KTBG is one such station, where listenership, member dollars and community interest continue to improve in defiance of economic forecasts and cultural trends.

I flew into Kansas City International airport last month for a weekend trip, and after presenting myself at the rental car desk, promptly fainted when the lady informed me gas was running at about $4.28/gallon. I have rarely driven since moving to Manhattan, and still remember gas being less than a dollar a gallon when I arrived in Missouri only seven years ago. After peeling myself off the floor, I set off on the 45-minute trip east in my less than glamorous Kia Rondo to my alma mater, the University of Central Missouri, which owns KTBG.

It was about 11am when I arrived at the station. The sounds of Wilco were drifting through the speakers, and the place was deserted. Kind of like when I was a student working here seven years ago, I thought. Wrong: I’d soon learn this was just an unnatural lull. In addition to the paid staff, there are a record 19 students working at the station this summer. That’s about twice as many as worked there during the school year when I was a student.

I first landed in Warrensburg, Missouri on January 1, 2001, which I later learned was the very same day Jon Hart returned to his hometown to program the station after 23 years in Kansas City proper. At that point, it was actually a jazz station, KCMW, and had previously operated as a classical station, never having raised more than about $12,000 in either capacity during a single fund drive. Jon actually worked there originally as a high schooler (and was fired five times) and had now arrived back with the ambitious goal of transforming the station into a viable and valuable cultural commodity with little in the way of resources. I, meanwhile, was looking for a reason to stick around for the summer and thought: “Hey, being a DJ could be fun!”

By my count, there were nine of us students working there that first summer, and virtually all of the others have long gone on to non-broadcasting careers from law to teaching math. Some of us were in it for a “cool” (i.e. non-Pizza Hut) job, while others just had severe cases of audio visual nerdiness. Not one of us was there for the love of jazz. There was no real station image to embrace, no events or community initiatives. But over the summer, our enthusiasm for the job expanded exponentially as we were all let in on one big secret: at summer’s end, our underachieving little jazz station would flip formats to something called Triple A.

We held weekly meetings about what exactly that meant, while Jon built a music library from scratch using his own and our personal CD collections, including us in aspect, from picking core artists to station branding. Within a few short months we had new call letters, a logo, a music library, and most importantly real enthusiasm for our air shifts.

On August 1, 2001, 90.9 The Bridge signed on with “Some Bridges” by Jackson Browne, and the change was instant and palpable. Listener feedback was overwhelmingly encouraging (in fact, one such listener named Leslie ended up marrying Jon and working at the station, so she must have really liked the change). That very morning, five or six promising new students showed up to volunteer their time, almost all of whom have gone on to broadcasting or music-related careers. Very quickly, we became a noticeable force in the Kansas City market, with steady presence at area concerts, while little by little, each fund drive proved we were on the right track. It was tremendously exciting to be a part of a success story being built on nothing but passion and hard work, and I’m happy to say that since I left the station in 2004, things have continued to improve dramatically.

I recently spoke to my former colleague David Houghton, now sound engineer and web and promotions manager, who described a plethora of new initiatives that most recently includes their first summer concert series in Kansas City. The Bridge has also been streaming for the entire life of the station, offers a podcast series as well as an archive of all in-studios, and has recently launched a YouTube page to gain more exposure for artist visits.

Most significantly, KTBG membership has increased by a minimum of ten percent every year since the format change. In March, the Bridge had its best-ever fundraiser, reaching the pretty unrealistic goal of $59,000 set by the CPB: a 60 percent increase on the previous record, qualifying the station for a significant grant.

“This radio station represents a community, and it felt to us only fair to let the community know what we were facing, and let them tell us how strongly they wanted us to move forward. It was like a vote: do you want us to take a little step forward or a huge step backward? This is the beginning of the story. Now, we have to work hard to justify all of the donations that people made,” said Hart.

Monday’s New York Times featured a piece about those worst affected by raising gas prices. They are, of course, those people in rural America with a lower income and higher dependence on gas. But despite this trend, and the current economic recession, Bridge listeners are among those 30 million public radio listeners who still find enough value in their station to dig a little deeper in their pockets and continue to contribute.

–Julia Clarke

Times Square is an indisputable marvel of the modern world. An Eighth Wonder, if you will. There can be few other experiences, with the exception perhaps of a trip to Tokyo, that compare to the sensation of rising like steam out of New York’s musty subway, being propelled through a revolving door, squinting against the sudden light, and being swept up in a human wave (hundreds of people? thousands?) all with eyes fixed heavenward in a mass state of utter sensory overload.

There are the glittering lights, diverting animated screens, mile-high billboards, and that enormous Cup Noodle in the sky with steam rising appetizingly out of it. You can watch a music video on the side of MTV’s studios as you wait to cross the street and while away hours in the dozens of shrines to capitalism: from M&M candies to a scene from Forrest Gump. If you can detach yourself from the throng, you can buy hot nuts, comedy show tickets, Yankees sweatshirts, and everything else you don’t need.

And I write this as a Gothamite. After a year here, I still gasp and squint and ooh and ah every time I pass through. Even if you’ve been there a thousand times and hate cities and people and entrepreneurship, there is something very wrong with you if you are not dazzled by the spectacle that is Times Square.

New York is a human ecosystem. It is defined by the many humans who have sailed or driven or flown here looking for a new life over the past 400 years, shaping the landscape to their needs. But turn off the bright lights for a second and there’s a bigger story. When Henry Hudson sailed in on September 12, 1609, the island was known to its Lenape natives as “Manahatta,” or “the land of many hills.” I’m not sure at what point the name changed, but presumably it was when they did away with all the hills. It’s very hard to stand in Manhattan today and picture it hilly, but that’s largely because you can’t see much beyond the skyscrapers. There’s no horizon or perspective. But if you choose your location carefully, say, 89th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, or go all the way up to the northwest tip of the island, you’ll see it still does earn its name.

Eric Sanderson of the Wildlife Conservation Society in the Bronx is the project director of The Manahatta Project, which has devoted much of the last decade to fostering awareness of the natural world in this most urban of cityscapes. And it doesn’t get much more urban than New York: in 1950, it was declared the world’s first “mega city” with a population of 10 million people. Even though that number has reduced to 8 million today, the 1.5 million that live on the 23-square-mile Manhattan Island itself — and the millions more that flock to the heart of the city each day to work — makes for a dense population.

When Sanderson first moved to New York from California, he saw the island we all see it: a microcosm of the human footprint on the world, a turbulent web of diverse urban “ecosystems.” From Times Square, the Amazonian-like currents of people and vehicles snake out in every direction, above and under ground. Along manmade avenues creep lines of taxis like yellow beetles. Downtown, Greenwich Village is like an orchard, but instead of trees, you’ll find crooked old buildings, always with character. In contrast, the Financial District features skyscrapers standing straight and tall, like a newly planted forest holding the future paper of America. On the banks of the East River, the delta of the Lower East Side still resembles wasteland in parts. Uptown, the Upper East Side is an older, established wood, with new trees sneaking in that don’t quite blend in with their surrounding. The Upper West Side is a sweeping plain where the avenues always seem just a little broader, and then there’s the colorful, gritty, complexity of Harlem, the last frontier of gentrification. At the center of all of this lies the real-life pasture of Central Park: 843 acres of lawns, trees, water sources, and yes, even rolling hills. It was at Central Park last week where, fittingly, Sanderson offered a free lecture on The Manahatta Project, exhibiting his research into Manhattan’s original ecosystem, and outlining plans for the city’s 400th birthday next year.

The project began when Sanderson came across a British Headquarters Map of Manahatta from 1782. Combining historic and contemporary methods with the antique map, GPS and computer animation, he began to reconstruct the ecology of Manahatta and drew some startling conclusions. It’s often thought that the original ecosystem here was more or less uniformly marshy, rather like the view from the train to and from Newark Airport (which, I must add, is one of the bleakest, most depressing views anywhere in the world). To the contrary, Sanders discovered that Manahatta was originally home to 54 distinct ecosystems. That’s far more than Yosemite National Park. Take that, California!

The diverse human population that characterizes Manhattan today was once an array of wildlife, equally diverse (and dangerous): wolves, elk, mountain lion, deer, beaver, and tens of thousands of birds. Besides birds, you’d be hard-pressed to find any of these creatures here today outside of the Central Park Zoo, although a beaver in the Hudson last year did provoke hope for ecologists. What is today the neighborhood of Inwood was a chestnut grove. A stream ran right down 84th Street, where my apartment building now stands. In fact, Manahatta was full of streams running through forests and wetlands.

Today, these streams are gone, replaced by sewage systems and soggy subways, yet Sanderson’s motive is not to lament the past; rather, it’s to imagine a world without us. According to a recent UN estimate, by 2050, two thirds of the world’s population will reside in cities. Although cities are generally seen as the biggest strain on the environment, Sanderson actually views this as a good thing. More concentrated pockets of human population will, he believes, mean more of the rest of our land can be conserved.

On September 12, 2009, when the Manahatta Project celebrates the city’s quadro-centennial, Sanderson hopes to instill in the city’s inhabitants an appreciation of what lies beneath our feet, beyond the concrete. But instead of attempting to strip away what makes the city great today, he will use animation and art to simulate ecological history in an urban context.

There are many ideas for the celebrations, none set in stone, but the one that captured my imagination the most was the idea to hijack every available screen in Times Square, and replace the images with ones displaying what Manahatta once was. For Manhattan, there’s no going back; it will always be a city. But perhaps for one day next year I’ll be able to rise out of the hot subway, stumble through the revolving doors and gape at stately forests, lush wetlands, and sparkling streams, listen to the call of birds, and breathe in traffic exhaust fumes.

–Julia Clarke

Thanks to a severe financial drought pervading the Clarke household, my summer activities this year included a walk along the boardwalk at Coney Island, two weekends in Vermont, and a visit to the world’s oldest book shop in Bethlehem, PA. That wasn’t the actual purpose of the trip; I was visiting family. Not finding a whole lot to do in the town that calls itself Christmas City, we took a stroll down Main Street where the Moravian Book Shop stands. Founded in 1745, and operating in its current location since 1871, it earned the coveted title of the country’s (and possibly the world’s) oldest continuously operating book store when John Smith & Son closed in 2000.

I must admit, I was mildly excited (I was in Bethlehem, remember) by the prospect of popping in and browsing the dusty leatherbound volumes, mostly classics, where countless academics and great thinkers before me had presumably come to enlightened conclusions about timely matters. I envisioned uneven wooden floors, sunlight catching the centuries-old dust as it streamed in through window panes of that thick, wavy glass you tend to see in old places. Perhaps there would portraits of intelligentsia past and present hanging on the walls.

“As you can see, it’s become a bit commercialized,” my sister-in-law chuckled as we walked in. She wasn’t kidding. Instead of the ceiling-high shelves laden with volumes displaying their titles in gold print on their spines that I’d imagined, the walls were bare. There was no ladder-on-wheels to reach the very high-up ones (presumably the Faulkners that you’d have to really, really want to read in order to go all the way up there). In fact, there weren’t any books in visible range at all. It was a gift shop.

Upon first taking in that odd, but kind of standard collection of knick knacks one finds in a gift shop – funky wallets, phenomenally expensive day planners, fluffy pens and plastic necklaces – I decided that the books must be located in the back of the surprisingly large store. After tripping over a life-sized stuffed Rottweiler whose purpose I could not determine, I made my way to the back of the store, through a section containing heftily-priced nightgowns and an astonishing array of lavender scented toiletries, to find myself in a coffee shop selling gourmet foods, and beyond that an inexplicable section that was selling Christmas decorations in July.

Now don’t get me wrong: all of these items were very nice and it would probably be a great place to get your Christmas shopping done. I was just a bit disappointed to find no tangible evidence of history – or even any books – in the country’s oldest book store. (To be fair, I think there were books of the Barnes & Noble variety on the lower level, but I found myself distracted by an enormous pepper mill shaped like a golf ball and never made it down there.)

An hour later I emerged, having spent $16.95 on The Wine Lover’s Companion Book, which was essentially a notepad where I could record notes about wine that I had enjoyed. It was about the closest thing to an actual book I could find on the main floor. Feeling a little cheated, I began to question why I am so bothered when historical sites aren’t preserved in their original form. I am all for progress, but it has always seemed such a shame to me to strip places of whatever characteristics made them of historical value in the first place, and then rather silly to then tout them for that historical value.

For instance, when I lived in Boston, I was invariably surprised when I alighted the (country’s oldest) subway at State Street only to find that the station itself resided in The Old State House. As the former home of the British Government in Boston, and the site of the reading of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, it always seemed to me that it ought to now hold something a bit more significant than a subway. On a side note, across the street from this is the site of the famed Boston Massacre, which is now a traffic island.

In New York, public outcry at such developments tends to be somewhat more common, and usually concerns business with an importance that is more cultural than historical, such as the demise of Tower Records, a corporation that had stood for a whopping twenty years. Another example is the forced closure of the famed CBGB’s nightclub which was reported across the country, or of the Chelsea Hotel, former home to Syd and Nancy, Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin, which made headlines this summer when its longtime manager was replaced by a major hotelier that specializes in turning historic places into high-end inns. This news came much to the disgust of those who view the hotel’s decrepitude as inspirational “shabby chic.”

It is these last two examples that have made me begin to rethink my nostalgic aversion to revamping historic sites. From what I’ve seen of it, the decaying Chelsea could probably use a facelift in order to continue legally operating as a hotel, and CBGB’s hadn’t been making a significant contribution to the music scene in years, if not decades, when it finally closed its doors. The final week’s lineup included performances by Bad Brains, The Dictators, Avail, Bouncing Souls, and the only act I have ever heard of, Blondie, was also twenty years past any kind of significance. And the capitalist deep inside me realizes that the Moravian Bookstore probably would have crumbled away years ago if not for the happy tourist buying overpriced ornaments. As for Boston, who wants to commemorate a massacre anyway?

What I’ve realized is that cultural significance itself is relative. We need to pick our battles when it comes to preserving history, and allow the rest to become a tourist trap. Nostalgia alone cannot sustain us; in fact it tends to be nostalgia that hinders progress. So I will just have to make do with taking one last look back, and then looking forward to the next bookshop or venue or hotel that will inspire a generation. Besides, I’ve just read about a 120-year-old church up in British Columbia was recently turned into a winery, so I need to go and start planning my trip up there so I can being filling out The Wine Lover’s Companion Book.

–Julia Clarke

The intriguing thing about New York–and I discovered this upon my first visit here ten years ago–is that it is virtually exactly the same as you imagine it will be. Like most people, I grew up inundated with images of the city, usually projected onto large screens, so long before I ever got here that I knew what the skyline looked like, and what it was like to cross the street in Manhattan into an oncoming wave of pedestrians. I knew that the roads were filled with yellow taxis and there would be steam rising up through the subway shafts. It really is just the way you think and hope it will be, minus the oversized gorilla rampaging through the streets and plucking distressed damsels from skyscrapers.
However, next week will mark three months since I moved to New York City, and I have to say that as times goes on you discover there are a few notions about the place that are simply false. So here I am to dispel a few myths.

First, New Yorkers are not always in a hurry. There is not a frantic wave of pedestrians surging forth at tsunami speed, all of whose members are determined to get there first. In fact, New Yorkers walk very…fucking…slowly. The later you are for work, the slower they will walk. If construction has forced a sidewalk to reduce to fifty percent of its usual width, meaning less space to squeeze by, they will walk even slower. If the “walk” signal is about to change to “don’t walk”, they will walk slower still. If the entire future of mankind rested on New Yorkers walking at even a reasonable pace . . . well, you can be sure we wouldn’t have to worry about global warming anymore.

Second, and this one is perhaps more obvious, New York is not a big apple.

Third, New York is not host, as was recently claimed, to America’s worst drivers. That dubious distinction belongs to Boston, and always will.

Fourth, and this one has been especially disappointing to me, you will not see famous people on the streets of New York. The only time that you will see Julianne Moore strolling down 5th Avenue enjoying ice cream with her kids is in the pages of People magazine. You will never see celebrities in candid “hey, celebs are just like us!” moments on the streets of New York.

People who lived in Greenwich Village in the 1970s, 1980s, or even early 1990s should pay special heed to this next one: the Village is not a bohemian oasis where art and alternative lifestyles thrive. It is dirty, smelly, and full of drunk frat boys and homeless people. There is a good chance if you go there you will leave with someone else’s blood, vomit, or urine on your person. Let go of the past.

The sixth myth is one I must clear up as I am now technically a resident: New Yorkers are not unfriendly. That’s all I have to say on that subject.

The seventh and final myth I’d like to dispel is this: New York cab drivers aren’t crazy, they are just enthusiastic. I’m tired of hearing complaints about the perilous nature with which they conduct their profession. We pay them to get us from A to B, and by God they will get us there in as little time as possible, often in a straight line, especially when a straight line is not possible/safe/legal. Who are we to criticize this courageous zealousness??? So what if pedestrians must occasionally perish at the hands of their efficiency?

Frankly, if they had walked faster when crossing the street this wouldn’t be a problem.

–Julia Clarke

Ask any of my former co-workers at WUMB what I have in common with Johnny Damon and they’ll be able to tell you. No, I am not a 6’2″, 175 lb., hairy major league baseball player with a .289 batting average. Or a man, for that matter. In fact, I don’t really even understand the rules of baseball, and trying to teach me using the salt and pepper shaker on the table of a diner won’t change that. I am culturally predisposed to not understand the rules American sports. I only understand football (soccer to you) and maybe rugby, so what could I possibly have in common with Johnny Damon? Well, to start, he did play for the Royals, and I spent a summer running the board for Royals games at a tiny AM station in rural Missouri, so at a strech we have that in common. (By the way, how is it possible that someone who is 3rd among active major leaguers in runs and 7th in hits and stolen bases started his career playing for the worst team in baseball?)

But I digress. We do in fact have one rather major thing in common, at least when it comes to my former co-workers; we both “deserted” the great town of Boston for the (in my opinion) even better city of New York. So when the memo went out at WUMB announcing my departure for the gig at Songlines and likening me to Johnny Damon (and Wade Boggs, and Roger Clemens), it was not a salute to the player who helped the Sox win their first championship in 86 years, but rather it was meant to denounce me as a traitor. Understandably, I’ve been wrestling with this comparison for the past month. Though I didn’t become a Sox fan during my year in Boston, working with a group of rabid Sox fans was one of the most fun things about my job there. They actually get excited when the truck loads up and leaves Fenway for Spring training in Florida. And they stay excited until the end of the season. Or at least until September when it becomes clear they won’t be making the World Series. Every morning for the interminably long 162 game season there consists of hysterical jubilation or morbid commiseration, as every play of the previous night’s game is rehashed. It’s hard not to get caught up in that kind of sweeping, lasting enthusiasm. So, what I’m trying to say is that understanding the nuances involved in the comparison, I didn’t take too kindly to being called “Johnny Damon.” Furthermore, as a St. Louis Cardinals fan (long story), I don’t even like Johnny Damon. He robbed us! But then again, life in Boston also taught me that it’s always better to be a Johnny Damon than a Wally Pip…

Fortunately, New York enjoys such a diverse population that I haven’t been defined by such a derogatory term since I moved here last month. In fact, I work with a Pirates fan and an Indians fan, so the whole Yankees/Red Sox rivalry doesn’t even figure into the nine-to-five life here at Songlines. Moreover, the only Yankees fan I have met here comes from Boston, and there’s at least one Red Sox fan who lives in my building. So my initial fear of being booed by Bostonians, and having dollar bills thrown at me when I made my New York debut has subsided. Nonetheless, I do take offense at being compared to Damon (and will until I secure a $52 million contract). I have cut my hair since moving here, but not in deference to the strict appearance code at Songlines. I definitely haven’t shaved my beard. I still don’t understand the rules of baseball. And I have to point out that I did not “switch sides” professionally. Yes, I worked at radio for the last six years and now I work in promotion, but contrary to certain belief, radio and promotion are not in competition. We are not Red Sox versus Yankees. In fact, we are both all about getting good music out to a meaningful audience. Mind you, I bet Damon says the same thing, he’s still playing the same game, right? So there’s something else we have in common.

At this point, I should mention that Damon doesn’t even live here, he lives in Florida. But the fact is, as much as I don’t want to be compared to Johnny Damon, I can totally understand why he made the move; New York is the most exciting city on earth. Sure, Boston is great, but it does go to sleep for a few hours each night. Like Ryan Adams, Frank Sinatra, and a million others, I fell madly in love with New York upon my first visit ten years ago. I’ve lived in Scotland, Missouri, Vermont, and Boston, and nowhere else even begins to measure up. The act of living here itself is the accomplishment of a major ambition for me. So as the Yankees may have been the best thing that ever happened to Johnny Damon, Songlines is the best thing that ever happened to me. I get to keep doing what I love in a city I adore. I love that Central Park is only four blocks from my apartment, and that I can go to the Met whenever I want. I love feeling like one of the millions of foreigners here, instead of “the foreigner.” In fact, I’m kind of sick of hearing other Scottish accents already. I love every step I have to climb to get to my fifth floor walk-up, and the fact that “I’m Waiting for the Man” by the Velvet Underground goes through my head every morning when I change trains in Harlem. I have already had the best ginger martini of my life here. I’ve seen Rudy Giuliani. I’ve already subscribed to The New Yorker. And I don’t find New Yorkers to be rude. I feel like I’ve always been a New Yorker, and if anyone asked me if they should move here, I would tell them definitively “yes.” So while I set out to prove how completely different I am from Johnny Damon, I guess I have more compassion for him than I realized. That said, I’ll still be rooting for the Cardinals this season, as I sip on a Sam Adams in a pub in Manhattan.

–Julia Clarke

Sean Coakley and Melanie Shrawder are delighted to announce that WUMB’s Julia Clarke will be joining our promotion team in less than two weeks!

Originally from Glasgow, Scotland, Julia Clarke first came to the States for a semester abroad at the University of Central Missouri, home of KTBG. Much to the dismay of her parents, and to the delight of her future Yankee husband, David, Julia fell in love with the land of milk and honey—that is, the land where milk and honey are spices—and decided to stay in the U.S. of A. Overwhelmed by the charm of her Scottish brogue (it’s a burr if you want to be technical), Jon Hart hired her to be his midday host in 2001, and she remained at KTBG until 2004. After that, she did a stint as promotions director and midday host at WNCS in Montpelier, Vermont.

For the last year, Clarke has served as music director of WUMB in Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to managing musical programming, she booked all musical guests and acted as artist liaison for live studio guests, and helped plan special events including the annual WUMB Boston Folk Festival. She was also co-host of the Morning Express, and contributed to the station’s folk music publication “Folkwaves.”

Grace Potter with Julia Clarke